Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
Premiere: Vienna, December 22, 1808
Piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon,
2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings
***
Allegro con brio
Andante con moto
Allegro
Allegro
Program Notes by Martin Pearlman
At the end of the year 1808, Beethoven produced an extraordinary -- and exhausting -- concert of his own music. The program included the premieres of both his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and of his Fourth Piano Concerto with Beethoven himself as soloist, as well as movements from his Mass in C, the dramatic scene and aria Ah! perfido, and Beethoven's improvisations on the piano. Originally, the Fifth Symphony was to end the evening, but the composer feared that the audience might be too tired to listen to such a demanding piece at the end of a long concert. So he placed it earlier on the program and then, making the concert even longer, substituted a grand finale of a new, hastily written Choral Fantasy (op. 80) for which he improvised the opening piano solo. The entire event took a full four hours in a bitterly cold hall.
Beethoven's friend Reichardt wrote that "one can easily have too much of a good thing -- and still more of a loud one. Nevertheless, I could no more leave the box before the end than could the exceedingly good-natured and delicate Prince [Lobkowitz]," since Beethoven was conducting the orchestra near them. To make matters worse, the orchestra and chorus did not like or support the cantankerous composer, and there had been so little rehearsal time that some of the pieces had not gotten a single full rehearsal. "Thus," writes Reichardt, "many a failure in the performance vexed our patience in the highest degree." Needless to say, the Fifth Symphony, survived its first outing to become one of the most beloved works in the entire orchestral repertoire.
This radical symphony evolved over a surprisingly long time. Beethoven began sketches for it -- initially without the famous opening bars -- in 1804, immediately after completing his revolutionary Third Symphony (Eroica); but work on it was interrupted by numerous other projects. His opera Fidelio, the Razumovky quartets, the Violin Concerto, the Appassionata sonata for piano, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Fourth Symphony all come from this amazingly fertile time. The commission for the Fourth Symphony required him to revisit the simpler style of his earlier works. But even after he was able to return to his avante-garde Fifth, Beethoven labored simultaneously on his Sixth Symphony (Pastoral), a work in a much gentler spirit.
Almost from the beginning, the Fifth Symphony has taken on extra-musical meaning for many people, even though the composer himself insisted that he was not writing program music. Beethoven's friend and biographer Schindler started a popular legend, which has survived to the present day, when he claimed rather questionably that the opening motive was meant to represent "fate knocking at the door." From the Napoleonic Wars through World War II, this symphony has been used in patriotic causes, and over time it has become so ubiquitous in concert halls and in popular culture that it can be difficult for an audience to listen to it with fresh ears. The challenge, a richly rewarding one for both performers and listeners today, is to play and listen to this astonishing work in a way that can feel the sense of excitement and danger that it demands.
The symphony opens with what is certainly the most recognizable motive in all of classical music -- and also one of the most powerful. It is a highly compressed four-note motive that appears in almost every measure of the first movement. But many other details have also drawn comment from composers and critics through the centuries: the unusual and beautiful variations in the slow movement, the unprecedented intensity of the third movement Scherzo, the surprisingly static but tense transition to the Finale, and the grandiose, triumphant character of the Finale itself. With that Finale, the key of C minor, a dark and impassioned key for Beethoven, gives way to a bright, triumphal C major, in which the sound of the orchestra is suddenly filled out by the addition of a contrabassoon at the bottom of the range, a piccolo at the top, and trombones in the middle range. It is perhaps the most controversial movement of the symphony, a "meaningless babel" to Beethoven's contemporary Louis Spohr and a brilliant appearance of the sun to others. It ends with an almost obsessively long sequence of repeated C major chords, a conclusion which writer Charles Rosen suggests is necessary "to ground the extreme tension of [this] immense work."
Boston Baroque Performances
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
March 4 & 5, 2016
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
May 4 & 5, 2007
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor